Of course.
Housing and overcrowding and lack of infrastructure is a dire crisis in the north. I can't underline that enough.
There are issues of overcrowding because there is a lack of housing. A lot of families choose to stay in the north. Then there is a lack of child care in the north, including because of a lack of infrastructure for child care spaces. Unfortunately, that means that everyone is in one space all the time. Poor housing also deters a lot of women from being able to leave violent situations if there's no place for them to go, so we do end up having a lot of communities with cycles of violence because of lack of space and independence.
Also, there's the issue of the ability to even start a business. In the business network, we have a lot of wonderful, talented Inuit businesswomen who are unable to have storefronts, one, because of the cost, and two, because there is no place for a storefront. So they're operating businesses within their homes. But if you already have your partner, two kids, and maybe an adult child with their own child in a two-bedroom house that's not even meeting standards that would be acceptable in the south, operating a business from those spaces is very difficult. A lot of them are starting their businesses in their kitchens, or perhaps in a back bedroom, and sometimes in the summer they might be outside working. They might have a shed that they're working out of, and I think that points to their extreme resiliency and wanting better for their communities and families and themselves as well.
I would definitely recommend immediate higher investments in infrastructure. Also, there are a lot of other barriers. We just had a gender-specific session on child care led by Pauktuutit, and one of the things we heard from some child care providers is that the stipulations and regulations around child care spaces are very southern. A very specific example is that when trying to build a new building, you have to have three contractors give you an appraisal, but in a community of 800 to 2,000, where are you going to find three contractors to give you those appraisals within a very specific time limit to meet regulations proposed by the government? We definitely need to review the funding regulations for infrastructure and increased investment in housing.